The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

  Vladimir Zenzinov, Coming of Age

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  businessmen? Additionally, my eldest brother also graduated from the Moscow Imperial Technical College and earned a diploma in mechanical engineering. But he became a merchant and entered my father’s business. My other brother—the “good for nothing”—did not feel the need to further his studies upon graduating from the Alexander Commercial Institute. Both of them led fairly dissipated lives and caused periodic trouble for our parents. Their friends were of little interest, especially those of Mikhail (whom the Bolsheviks later executed). This was how the youth of that circle lived, without any special spiritual interests.

  I am not sure of the circumstances which made me different. From my youngest years, my biggest joy was to find an interesting book and hide somewhere. I could read a book for many hours. I can still recall the sensation: you sit for hours in an easy chair in a quiet living room—everything else is forgotten. Nothing outside of the book exists. Suddenly I am called to dinner or for something else. I would immediately come to myself as if recovering from some hallucination and look around without recognizing the familiar surroundings. My brothers laughed at me. Once I found a note pinned above my bed which read: “Philosopher—king of donkeys.” (My brothers teased me by calling me “donkey” since I had protruding ears in childhood.)

  Father would get angry because I would always arrive for family tea with a book. I would put it next to my place setting and try to read so as not to waste time over tea. Indignantly he would say, “And your books are all unusual, big and thick.” (At that time, as I recall, I was reading Buckle’s A History of Civilization in England in Pavlenkov’s large edition.) I gobbled up many books in childhood—and probably did not understand many of them properly. But of those which I understood, I clearly remember Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Tolstoy’s Childhood, Adolescence and Youth and The Cossacks, Emar, Mayne Reid, Cooper, Walter Scott, [Pushkin’s] The Captain’s Daughter, Gogol and Turgenev.

  Here in America, every time that I see a group of school children in a museum under the supervision of a teacher, and see how they address their instructors with friendliness and trust, I become envious. We in Russia, at least my generation, did not experience this. During our school years there was always an abyss between us and our teachers. Even worse than an abyss— enmity which often turned into hatred. We did not like or respect out teachers and they, in turn, were deeply indifferent to us. Why this occurred I do not know, but I think the fault lay less with us than with the teachers. We, schoolchildren, were like the children of other countries during all times, i.e., children with good and bad inclinations. Like soft wax, we could have been

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  molded into anything desired. But the majority of our teachers were poor pedagogues and educators.

  Here is one of my first impressions of gimnazium. This, likely, was one or two weeks after I entered the gimnazium. I was then nine years old. What will children at that age do when forty of them are gathered in one room and left to themselves? Obviously, the first thing is to be naughty! This is as natural as for a school of fish to splash and gambol in the water. And should play exceed the limits of the permissible, a smart teacher should stop the overly zealous kids and explain to them why their fooling around was excessive and intolerable. Punishment should be meted out only after they disobeyed the rules.

  All of this is elementary. But in our class, the following occurred. One of our pranksters thought up an amusement: he made a tube of paper and then, as from an air gun, shot chewed up blotting paper from it. If such a “bullet” hit a wall or ceiling, it stuck firmly. This activity was very absorbing and soon the ceiling in our classroom was covered with stars and constellations of red paper. I also participated in this joyous activity. Of course, this exceeded the boundaries of innocent play, but it is unlikely that this breach could be called a serious crime. Our class mentor thought otherwise. He did not attempt to explain to us why this mischief was unacceptable—he was only interested in who the offenders were. We, however, remained tight-lipped. Nobody made an admission or betrayed each other. For a long time he demanded confession and the remanding of the guilty. We remained resolute and among us there were no cowards or traitors. Then he turned to cunning and announced that, this being the first time, he forgave the guilty in advance. He simply was requesting that an admission be made so that he would know who was capable of doing this—the guilty would not be punished. We went for the bait and trustingly made the admission. Among those confessing was me. How bewildered—no, horrified—we were, when, despite the mentor’s solemn promise, we were cruelly punished. We were left after school for two hours in a locked room! I recall that most of all we took this as a moral blow. Our mentor had made a promise, which we believed, and had fooled us right there on the spot. From this moment on, we would have no faith in our teachers.

  In the eight years that I spent in the gimnazium, our relationship with our teachers was pretty much one of open civil war. Almost none of them were able to interest us in their subject. We felt that Greek and Latin were invented merely to torture us. Even the instructor in Russian language and literature, though he was Vladimir Ivanovich Shenrok, a Gogol scholar, could not engage us. Geography was a dead science—the mere enumeration of geographic names. It was particularly unpleasant when the “mute” map hung before us. On it we had to name and identify the mountain ranges, oceans and

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  rivers of the world’s five parts. Physics seemed a useless fabrication to us, as did, cosmography. I had a visceral revulsion for mathematics and, in all honesty, to this day cannot understand why we had to learn spherical geometry, trigonometry, Newtonian binomials, and suffer over logarithms. Even history failed to interest us.

  We studied all of this only because it was demanded of us and the teachers taught it because that was the educational program dictated by the Ministry of Education.

  When, as an adult, I began to study classical antiquity anew, I bitterly lamented that even those little bits of Greek and Latin which I absorbed in my gimnazium years, were almost totally forgotten. How I would love now to reread and hear the commentaries of Caesar, Ovid, Virgil and Horace, Plato, and especially Homer! I had read all of this once, but it was all a dead letter, “lessons” to which I had to respond, and which I could either learn or not. Why did no one interest us in this, or even try? Forget about inculcating a love for the subject. One may ask, who was at fault here? Of course, it was not us, the school children, but our teachers and our lifeless and deadening school system.

  The most fearful and unpleasant memories were of our history teacher— Viacheslav Vladimirovich Smirnov. This was a small and very quiet person with a short, dark beard. All his movements were in slow motion, his voice quiet. But he was the terror of the whole gimnazium. We all feared and hated him fiercely. He was very demanding. We had to be ready for anything that he might ask that was covered over the whole year. He never corrected the student, never interrupted him, or asked him to repeat. He waited— sometimes with malicious glee—until the student became entangled or stopped altogether.

  Frequently, the following took place. He would call on a student—he always made him come to the front: “Kananov!” Kananov, a tall and confident student, a dandy, wearing an inordinately wide leather belt, would willingly jump from his seat. He would push his way along the long desk, hop loudly to the floor and walk to the front of the room. There he would assume an almost defiant pose, jutting one leg forward and shoving a hand inside his belt. “Tell me,” the “historian” would say quietly, “about the events in Russia during the period of the War of the Roses in England.” The question was a tricky one—it required knowledge of Russian and English history. Kananov remained silent and so did Viacheslav Vladimirovich. (A deathly silence always reigned in his class
es because he noticed everything, saw all, and punished severely.) A minute would pass, then two. The silence became tense, unbearable to the class. Kananov put his other foot forward. Just as quietly, as if he had finished listening to Kananov, the “historian” would say: “Now, tell us

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  how Alcibiades governed.” Kananov immediately would liven up and begin in a confident tone: “Alcibiades was rich and famous. Nature endowed him generously with many talents . . .” and then suddenly he stopped, as if stumbling. Again the torturous silence. Kananov was terrorized and failed to comprehend anything. “The War of the Roses . . . what happened in Russia at that time? . . . Alcibiades . . . he was also, supposedly, famous for cutting off the tail of his favorite dog?” “Enough” the teacher would say dispassionately. Next to Kananov’s name in the grade book, at the very center of the list, he would, with a slight movement of the hand visible to the whole class mark a “one” or “the stake” (i.e., the lowest grade). Poor Kananov would return to his seat, this time without any boldness.

  A strange thing: in my eight years at the gimnazium I don’t ever remember even one student having a friendly, purely human relationship with a teacher. We had nothing to do with our teachers outside of class. They never went with us to museums, galleries, or the theater. We studied our lessons, they quizzed us on them—that was the limit of our relationship. To me, this now seems impossible, but that is precisely how it was. I know that later the reciprocity between students and teachers in primary schools and gimnaziums was different. I heard stories about other gimnaziums (not those run by the state, but the private ones) where friendships between teachers and students were developed. In my case, however, things were exactly as I described them, even more so. This was the situation prevalent in our generation.

  Despite everything said above, I nevertheless harbor good feelings and a grateful remembrance of the years spent in the gimnazium. Those years gave me much. They laid the foundation of my future life. But it is not the gim-nazium that I must thank for this.

  Herzen, in My Past and Thoughts, once expressed surprise as to why so much attention is given to first love in biographies, but that the first childhood friendship is rarely mentioned. Herzen, in recalling Ogarev, wrote: “I do not know why there is a monopoly of the memories of first love over the recollection of a youthful friendship.” I am prepared to reiterate this observation. In any case, in my life, my first friendship played an enormous role, perhaps even the determining one, for my whole life.

  His last name was Gorozhankin, and his name was Sergei. His father was professor of botany at the University of Moscow and director of the Botanical Garden. We quickly became friends. My other friend—even closer to me and one who had a decisive influence on me during those years—was of a completely different character and type. He had a large, irregular mouth, and dark fiery eyes. Were it not for his eyes, he would be unnoticeable. But when he became carried away—which happened quite frequently—and spoke of that which was precious and of interest to him, while ruffling his short hair

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  with his right hand, his eyes burned like coals. Usually he stayed away from everyone and only during a fight would he dive into the center of the pack oblivious of the blows which rained on him from all sides.

  I didn’t notice him for a long time. But, having accidentally talked to him at length once, I was convinced that he read a lot and that his favorite books and authors coincided with mine. This instantly drew us together. We started walking home together from school and had endless conversations on the way. His name was Evgenii Voronov. In contrast to Gorozhankin and me, he did poorly in school. So poorly, that he was kept back for a second year in several classes and managed to stay behind for a third year in the fourth grade. Thus, Gorozhankin and I quickly passed him in grade. Finally, he was even expelled for his lack of achievement. Meanwhile, this was a smart and capable boy—even talented, it may be said. In any case, he was smarter and more talented than many of our “top students” whose names adorned the gold board [of honor]. Whenever he was called to respond to a lesson, he would invariably become dull and unintelligible. That was how he was perceived by all the teachers. I do not know the explanation for this.

  What were the things that interested and linked us? Even now, I cannot fathom how boys of twelve to fourteen years old could have had the interests that we did then. We devoured an incredible number of books and lived in a state of feverish enthusiasm—shifting from one captivation to another. We read Adam Smith and Mill (always with Chernyshevskii’s commentary), Darwin, Buckle. We studied astronomy; our idol was Tolstoy; we were fascinated by Chekhov. In Voronov’s room, which was always filled with a multitude of books, there was a table on which the latest books lay—he called them “my sins.” These were the books which he had to read first. This was pretty much the case with me as well. In imitation of Chekhov’s story “Whist,” we invented our own special card game. Essentially, this was the simplest of games which children called the “game of drunks.” Its special feature was that instead of having four suits, we had four categories—belles-lettres, the socio-political, science and art. Rather than having face cards we had writers, publicists or public figures, scientists and artists. Tolstoy, Uspenskii, Chekhov, Darwin, and Beethoven were aces and the others followed according to rank. This game engaged us because we changed our aces and kings in relationship to our current enthrallments and had heated arguments and debates on this issue.

  We overthrew our idols frequently, but in the end always came to an agreement. The one irreplaceable ace was always Tolstoy. The leading role in these arguments was played by Voronov. He was the most inquisitive among us, and Gorozhankin and I usually deferred to his ardor and pressure. I remember that for a time we were fascinated by Malthus. But then we realized that,

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  in essence, his law of demographics was a deeply reactionary invention—and we threw him down in shame. He was replaced by Henry George with Progress and Poverty. It seemed that he supplied the key to solving all of humanity’s social ills. I recall that right during the period of my fascination with Henry George, who saw all mankind’s ills in land ownership and land tenancy, my father bought land in the Caucasus, and I experienced horrible moral suffering because of it. But, Henry George, too, was later removed from the pedestal. Our circle of interests was very broad. We even reached Herbert Spencer though, as Voronov said, his Psychology was as unpleasant to read as was the cod liver oil which had to be taken daily. The social sciences, such as economics and sociology, were of particular interest to us. I think that there was much in these books that we did not understand. But we took these books by storm, the way in which a fortress was attacked.

  Our moral development instinctively paralleled the development of Russian societal opinion. We worshiped the Decembrists, knew lines from Ryleev by heart, were captivated by the 40’s, and, as a substitute for their idealism, we accepted the nihilism and realism of the 60’s. This was followed by a reaching out to the people and the recognition that we must serve them, the discharge of societal obligations, and the rejection of privileges. Secretly, I even imposed strict limitations on myself—I slept under a light blanket, refused sweets and other extras.

  For a long time our idol was Mikhailovskii who was then writing and battling in the journals with a nascent Marxism. We waited impatiently, as if for an event, for each issue of Russkoe Bogatstvo. We would go to the journal’s office, located near the Nikitskie Vorota [Gates], in order to receive it directly from the office manager. Someone told us that this was likely the uncle of Gleb Uspenskii, who was then in an institution for the mentally ill. We were especially fascinated by Mikhailovskii’s theory of progress, by his doctrine of “hero and crowd.”

  Something that gave a specific edge to our intellectual concerns was the constant striving to apply each new discovery to everyday life and to
engrained habits. We found the roots of animism and beliefs peculiar to primitive people, as well as countless survivals of the past, in contemporary society. We mocked these fiercely and applied the “hero—crowd” theory to everyday life. We would, in so doing, cite Taylor’s two-volume History of Primitive Culture, Malthus, Henry George, Darwin, Spencer, and Mikhailovskii. The leading role in all of these obsessions was played by Voronov. He was the most temperamental, impatient, and fervent, the same Voronov who was expelled from the gimnazium for being “dull” and an “un-derachiever.” Together, the three of us wrote letters to Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mikhailovskii—we posed questions to them, expressed our enthusiasm and

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  support and sometimes even criticized them. And what is most astonishing, we received replies from them. It is unlikely that they suspected they were dealing with fourteen to fifteen year old youths!

  From the very beginning, social problems were at the very heart of our aspirations: thoughts of how society could be better governed, a society in which injustice could be seen at every step. How was humanity to achieve universal happiness? We knew that human life was short, that banality could soon crush us in its grasp, the way it crushed all those who had reached the age of thirty. So we rushed to effect our ideas into an actual project. We began to publish a [political] journal.